Claife Heights
Claife Heights at 270m (886ft) is the long, forested ridge on the western shore of Windermere, giving fine views of the lake through the trees.
Is it worth going? — Today’s conditions & 7-day summit forecast
Modelled guidance for the 270 m summit. Always check the Met Office mountain forecast and MWIS before you set off.
On the summit today (Fri 11 Sep): 15° to 9°C, gusts to 17 mph, 2.4 mm of rain forecast.
Forecast snapshot from 11 Sep 2026, 08:30 UTC — refreshed nightly and updated live in your browser. Temperatures and gusts adjusted to the 270 m summit altitude via Open-Meteo. Summit conditions are always harsher than the valley — check the professional mountain forecasts before you go.
Claife Heights at a glance
Claife Heights
Getting there
Classifications & hill data
The short answers
Is Claife Heights a Wainwright?
Claife Heights is one of Wainwright's Outlying Fells, not one of the 214 in the Pictorial Guides. It is also on the Marilyn list.
Where do you park for Claife Heights?
The nearest car park we hold is Claife Heights, south-east (layby 2), about 0.7 km from the summit in a straight line. The next is Claife Heights, south-east (layby), 1.0 km out. We only look within 2.5 km, measured straight-line: over longer distances a road may cross a pass and the drive bears no relation to the line.
Routes up Claife Heights
No route guide for this fell yet. The nearest routes we publish start close by:
- Hawkshead into the woods — starts 3.0 km away
- Orrest Head — starts 3.5 km away
- Wray Castle & the Windermere west shore — starts 3.7 km away
Parking & buses for Claife Heights
Best parking to hike Claife Heights
Where we have the data, each parking spot also shows the nearest public toilets and facilities (cafés, pubs, shops).
Positions are approximate — zoom the map to confirm. Lakeland car parks fill before 9am on fine weekends.
Tip: pan and zoom the interactive map at the top of this page to spot other potential parking near your route.
Vehicles are left entirely at their owner’s risk. We list places people park; we cannot vouch for any of them. Judge it on the day: take valuables with you, leave nothing on show, and if a spot feels wrong when you get there, park somewhere else.
Getting to Claife Heights by bus
The nearest bus stop we hold is the 505 at Low Wray, at Wray Castle Road End, 6.1 km of walking from the start — not realistically reachable without a car.
Rural routes change seasonally — confirm on stagecoachbus.com (opens in new tab) or Traveline before relying on a last bus.
Hazards on Claife Heights
No hazard card for this fell. The usual open-fell rules apply: check the forecast, carry a map and compass, and turn back in cloud if the ground is not what you expected.
Map & nearby Birketts
Skip mapFree mapping: OpenTopoMap / OpenStreetMap (switch layers top-right). Parking positions are approximate.
Nearest parking: Claife Heights, south-east (layby 2), about 0.7 km from the summit (straight line). Full parking, toilets and bus details are below.
Birketts near Claife Heights (within 3 km)
No bonus Birketts within 3 km — every Birkett near here is already a Wainwright summit, so just enjoy the walk.
On the hill: terrain and water on Claife Heights
Terrain & access
A 270 m top with a mapped path to within about 7 m of the summit. The summit is not on CRoW open access land, and the direct approach crosses land that is neither access land nor a right of way — there may be no public right to the top, so check access before you go.
Computed from open data, not walked — pathless ground needs confident navigation, and mapped paths, barriers and access boundaries can be incomplete. Data © OpenStreetMap contributors (via Overpass); Natural England CRoW Access Land; DoBIH; Copernicus GLO-30. See the terrain & access report for how this is worked out across all 144 fells.
Access on Claife Heights
Access: the summit lies within mapped open-access land, but the approach crosses enclosed land on a recorded right of way — stay on the path through the enclosed sections.
Local restrictions can close open-access areas temporarily — check the official open-access information (opens in new tab) before travelling.
How we worked this out
Summit and approach positions are tested against Natural England’s CRoW Act 2000 access layer; rights of way and wall or fence detail come from OpenStreetMap. Both are open datasets with known gaps — in our own survey only 4 of 23 wall and fence crossings had a stile or gate mapped within 150 m — so absence of a mapped feature never means absence of a real one. Nothing here is field-verified unless marked, and none of it is legal advice. How we checked 378 fells.